Sylvia's Journal

When the rains come pouring down we cannot hear ourselves think – we have to use the mic to get ourselves heard about the noise on the tin roof. Outside the rains come down in sheets that wash all the cars in a minute or two. And then, usually, the rain moves on and everything dries up in no time, as if nothing happened.

People here like the rains as much as we dislike them in Holland or London – rain is a life force in many parts of Africa. One of my colleagues told me, “when I arrive from the air I look down on the green mountains around the city I am so proud and happy.” I can’t imagine saying that when landing at Schiphol airport.

Today we entered into more delicate reflections about behavior of self and behavior of the bosses. Some people’s bosses are in the room and there is a slight nervousness about this dynamic and unease, understandable, to even acknowledge this dynamic – but it is the elephant in the room. And so we are treading lightly.

We did an exercise about team roles in group discussions. On purpose we had given the people who we have seen initiating a lot (initiate is one of the four roles in Kantor’s Four Player System) the role of observer. Not surprisingly they got so caught up in the conversations that it took a lot of coaxing by us to get them to actually observe. They admitted that keeping their mouths zipped up was very difficult.

I am adding some of the exercises I used to do with participants before we had a standard leadership curriculum. I had forgotten about them an am rediscovering my overflowing electronics materials library which I carry around the world in my dropbox. These exercises and think pieces are about things that are very relevant to this group: managing one’s boss, dealing with team dynamics, political thinking, public sector managers who want transformational change – what are they up against? There are many private sector gurus who are copied and whose words are put on powerpoints for audiences that can’t possibly do much with them because public sectors are different – missing control over two key resources: people and money.
We are getting good feedback from the group – their heads buzzing with ideas that explain things they took for granted. Just what we wanted.

Day two has come and gone and the ‘free and open’ dialogue that participants wanted is starting haltingly – a move of a few inches. The progress was recognized by the same person who mentioned it missing yesterday – “I was a little holding back myself,” she admitted today. An amazing remark from one of the more senior people in the room.

If they acknowledged yesterday that inspiring was their weak point, today they started to see how one can inspire – how energy gets produced when people create together a picture of the future they would like to create. Together they had dreamed and talked about that until we had five sheets of drawings with tons of information. I took it all back to the hotel. I got up early this morning to pull out major themes from the mass of data. Last night I was too pooped to do that and unable to see any patterns. This morning they danced off the page. We verified the words against the pictures they drew and it was right on, no energy lost in the process. Pfffh!

We compared this vision (albeit it with a slightly different focus) with the one that was in the formal strategic plan, probably produced by a consultant – and everyone could see and feel the difference. It was a demo of what a shared vision does, not what it is. QED.

The rest of the day went fast as the participants tackled a variety of tasks, all aimed at helping them be more systematic and intentional in their behaviors and actions toward their vision. We had to do with one facilitator less who was pulled away to deal with a very serious family crisis. If ever one needed a team it was today, and we pulled together, weaving in and out of each others’ sessions as if we were twins, thinking nearly alike. It was a great experience.

We are also working closely with another USAID project and trying to produce a strong piece of fabric, they the warp and we the weft.

Day one of our workshop came and went. We are no longer planning in a vacuum as we have experienced a day of interactions. At the end of the day in a reflection the words ‘passion’ and ‘fun’ surfaced. I was happy – those are good words when you talk about things that matter.

A workshop such as this one is as much developmental as it is diagnostic. We learned that everyone recognizes the imbalance between planning (perceived as a strength) and inspiration (lacking), the latter explaining much about implementation falling behind. All this is not unusual in the public sector in my experience.

In the meantime I am trying to sort out the rest of my stay in South Africa – something that is creating some sleepless nights for me as I try to balance expectations and commitments. I wonder if this has something to do with my internal temperature controls being totally out of whack – it does make one tired, these nights full of flashes.

My scrabble interactions with family and friends back in Europe and the US are hindered by not understanding how my smart phone opens up or not to the internet. It seems totally random, no matter what I do. I think it has something to do with T-Mobile being in control even though I have a South Africa simcard. I miss these daily exercises in word cleverness and the chats that accompany them.

At the end of the day the rains came down in sheets again, just when we headed back to the hotel with our fragile flipchart papers that contained the faint outline of a vision. Oh how I missed Sita during the visioning session. She would have done such a superior job scribing and helping participants see their dreams and thoughts on paper.

A and I spent the morning going over the program of this week’s workshop in order to divide the work. Most of the exercises he is familiar with so we can lighten each other’s’ load. Some are new to him. Everything remains guesswork until we meet the 40 people who are taking a full week out of their schedule to learn new things. It is humbling.

Axel and I had hoped to hook up on Skype but all we ended up doing is the exchange of some emails. Internet access works through coupons with long strings of numbers that you have to put in every two hours, so I am not always ‘on’ the way I am in most other places. So I missed the chance to talk with Abuja.

While A was managing relationships I headed into the mountains with S and her baby on her back. At about 4 PM the rains and thunderclaps came – there were cells everywhere around us, you could see them but most of the time we were able to dodge them, sticking a wet finger in the air to guess their direction – although their movements seemed pretty random.

The rain and thunder cells are extremely local: 25 or 50 meters to one side of us everything got drenched while we stayed dry. Eventually, when we were near the top of a hill, a lookout post over the city, the rains reached us. When we saw some gigantic electrical charges in the dark grey sky we thought it better to return to the car.

We found a small restaurant where we could sit outside under a cover until the rains became so heavy that they found small holes in the awning pushing us inside. Although I went through great pains to request sauces on the side, the meal was once again heavy and mediocre. I have yet to eat a great meal here.

I watched baby A dribble this way, then that, never sitting still for a second, requiring mom to be on high alert all the time. A couple of years from now this will become a familiar experience for us, I thought. We can relieve Sita and Jim once in a while, or give the baby back to them. Either way seems like fun now.

I went to bed early and discovered the electricity gone in the morning, probably due to the long and heavy rains.

I woke up from a very vivid dream. I was visiting someplace, sitting at a dinner table, a dinner that preceded something else that required a speech. First one of my teeth came out, then more and more, they were like brittle barnacles – after a while I only had my front teeth left…and I was worried about what would happen next. I am trying to drag up the Freudian symbols from deep in my memory, from school days 35 years ago – teeth, speechlessness….hmmm.

I am reading ‘Games People Play’ from 40 or so years ago and have arrived at the heavy psychoanalytic part – games people play, having to do with power and sex – but so far teeth haven’t appeared yet.

I slept in this morning, a rare luxury. I put in the yoga DVD that I used to stay sane in Afghanistan, every other day and had, in spite of the best intentions, not used since I left Kabul. It was a bit of an effort to complete the 45 minute program. I didn’t like it anymore as much as I had in Kabul.

I rewarded myself with a full body massage that was so expertly done that it left me stunned and with serious massage brain for some time. Not able to do any work in that condition I took the hotel shuttle to Windhoek’s city center, hoping to visit the tourist information (closed), the museum (closed), a stationary shop to buy a roll of paper (closed), another store I was referred to for that sort of paper (closed). I gave up and found a nice café with internet so I could do my next scrabble moves with my three scrabble partners, have a nice (sauce-less) salad for lunch, a glass of cool white wine, some good coffee and a sinful dessert.

The stores that were open were like beehives and places best avoided. I returned to the hotel to finish facilitator notes for the simulation next week and am now ready to meet with one of the future facilitators to talk about how I can help him transform a lecture-driven approach to adult education into an experiential approach in his institution. This is extracurricular but it will be fun. My co-facilitator is also scheduled to land any minute now, so I will have an extra pair of experienced hands.

Everyone here speaks German, and many Afrikaans as well, so I can get around with the mother tongue. The waiter in the hotel, unable to speak English grinned when I told him he could speak German or Afrikaans with me and that I would talk back in Dutch.

What is also German is the abundance of meat, sausages especially, and beer. From South Africa the menu has taken the idea that no food is complete without a heavy sauce. The mussels from the Namibian coast, advertised as ‘fantastic’ came in a heavy cream sauce – I had to dig around to find the poor things, smothered in cream, butter and flour – they could as well have put balls of dough in there, shaped like mussels – such a shame.

Not surprisingly, there are a lot of big bellies everywhere. Not like Sita’s growing belly, which I follow on her belly blog, restricted to friends and family, but bellies fat from beer, red meat and heavy sauces.

After we were done with the introductory facilitator training for the introductory leadership workshop next week, and nearly missing the late lunch (all starch and sausage), I took the hotel’s shuttle to one of Windhoek’s two large shopping malls. The place was packed with teenagers, just like anywhere else. The place was also packed with clothing stores, telephone stores and house decorating stores, plus a few chain stores and knick-knack stores.

I got myself an internet dangle (3G) that will allow me to connect to the internet when not in the hotel. My ability to be ‘in touch’ is critical in my current position. The instructions on how to work it seemed very complicated but everyone assures me it is easy.

My next stop was the candy and then the toy store to buy materials for the management simulation we will do next Friday and markers and sticky notes for the entire week. I had so many poor-quality plastic bags that I had to purchase a more solid bag to carry my new possessions home.

Just as I made my way to the place where the hotel shuttle would stop for a pick-up, all hell broke loose, thunder and lightning and heavy rains on the metal roof that made it hard to hear yourself think, let alone converse with anyone. When the first thunder claps exploded above us I immediately thought it was a bomb explosion which shows that I am not entirely over Afghanistan. I quickly looked around me and saw that no one else was paying attention.

The rains come and go quickly, drenching everything and then they move on. People seem to be used to it, carrying umbrellas or plastic garbage or shopping bags to put over their head and clothes.

I had bought myself a box of red wine for next to nothing and some dried fruit, both reminding me of Afghanistan, though in different ways – imagine buying a box of red wine in Finest Supermarket in Kabul!

I am devoting tomorrow to catching up on email requests and review of documents and such not connected with this trip. But first I booked a massage in the hotel spa in the basement – a reward for a week of very hard work.

I have been making 18 hour days since I arrived in Windhoek, leaving little time to write but tonight I was done at a more reasonable hour.

I am finding myself once again in the company of people who know the language of experiential learning but only as a concept. It is a delicate process to create opportunities to show when my so-called co-facilitators are highly credentialed people, as lecturers that is. It feels arrogant but I have to create these spaces for demonstrating what I am talking about because that is the only way to bring about a change.

Yesterday we started the crash course in applying adult education principles to teaching about leadership with people used to imparting knowledge. It was a halting start. There is pressure to produce a workshop that stands out from all the others AND to make sure there is ownership, all this in only a few days with people coming from such different background. So yesterday was the first tentative dance step – today a bit more and tomorrow is the last day before we are on stage so to speak, on Monday.

Last night my colleague Don and I had dinner at S. house and I finally saw baby A. S and I met at least 7 years ago, sitting next to each other on the plane to Lesotho and discovering we knew the same South African man: a friend of mine from previous work in South Africa, and her fiancée. Since then he has been staying at our house in Kabul, consulting to MSH while I never made it to Windhoek. And just when I finally made it, he is once again consulting in Kabul – such bad luck.

S’s company and ours work with the same ministry here and although it was a social visit, we did talk shop, mostly to make sure we complement rather than compete with each other. The dinner was lovely but took a big bite out of the evening, keeping me working till after midnight and up before 7 AM.

Today we met with the ministry that is sending 40 people to the national public administration learning institution where we and one of their staff will hold a one week workshop about leadership for decentralization. The meeting was to get the green light on the design and create some excitement. Without even having gone through the exercise a request for a repeat workshop is already on the table – followed by a request to prolong my stay here.

The rest of the day we worked with our counterparts through the program, a mini version of what we do next week. People are getting on board though not necessarily ready to lead sessions. We will play that by ear. My colleague A from Pretoria is joining us on Saturday, brining an extra pair of experienced hands.

We had lunch with the participants of another leadership and management program that is put on by a French group and part of the certificate program. They work like us with round tables and flipcharts on the wall.

I noticed the iPad near the plate of the participants. I asked him if he was the owner. Yes, he said, but he was still mastering it. He told us that he had to choose between a cow and an iPad, they are about the same value, and that he had chosen the iPad. This is a significant shift away from traditional practices. This then led to a heated conversation about paying for things in cash on or credit, about ‘those’ teenagers and such – not that different from conversations around lunch tables in other parts of the world I bet, except of course for the cow/iPad part.